Listen Now

Launching With Social

Start the launch process

The first thing I did was to prepare a PowerPoint presentation for people on the internal team. If you’re a one person show, you can prepare the same ideas and present them to a friend or even to yourself. What’s important is to go through the process below.

First you need to identify the audience you want to target. As part of the annual survey for Social Media Examiner and My Kids’ Adventures, we asked two questions.: “Do you listen to podcasts?” and “Are you a mom or a dad?”. Based on the responses we were able to determine that dads listen to podcasts more than moms which helped us to resize our expectations.

You then need to identify your biggest asset. Whenever you launch anything, you should use what I call tag-along marketing. You’ve built an audience somewhere – with a blog, a newsletter, an existing podcast. This asset you own is there for you to use. Piggyback some of the marketing efforts for your new venture on it. My biggest asset was the Social Media Marketing podcast.

Next take a look at who you’re up against. I looked at the Kids & Family category and identified Sesame Street, Adventures in Odyssey and other podcasts from established brands that have been around forever as competitors.

Parenting Adventures can be found on iTunes.

You need to establish what your product is all about. To wrap everyone’s heads around Parenting Adventures, I simply shared that it’s a 30 minute interview show followed by a fun activity.

Listen to the show to hear why this date was chosen to launch the Parenting Adventures podcast.

Find the best way to launch

One of my strongest assets are the relationships we’ve built. From these relationships, I was able to identify different “camps” of people we could reach out to for their support.

One of the obvious camps was staff and contractors who work for our company. For the second camp, we identified allies from the bloggers and podcasters the My Kids’ Adventures marketing team has been building relationships with for a year. Another camp included people who write for My Kids’ Adventures and the last camp was made up of my personal friends.

Listen to the show to find out other things we had in the launch pipeline.

Leverage your website traffic

When people come to your website to read an article, they might discover you have something more to offer.

We added the Parenting Adventures podcast to the website navigation bar at the top of the page, to the sidebar and the About Us page.

We added links to the Parenting Adventures podcast to several places on MyKidsAdventures.com.

I also put together a ‘help us spread the word’ page to give people everything they need to promote the show for us. On that page I included a video to thank people for their participation.

Listen to the show to discover how we are using this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast to promote Parenting Adventures.

I mentioned we had four groups (or camps) of people to communicate with via email and asked for their commitment to help us.

For example, we had our Managing Editor Jennifer Ballard reach out with an email to each of the My Kids’ Adventures writers. Each email was written to include their name and a personal note similar to the following.

SUBJECT LINE: Kirsten, Your help regarding MyKidsAdventure.com

Hi, Kirsten.

Thanks for writing for MyKidsAdventures.com. Thanks so much for you article on Glow-In-The-Dark Bowling.

Quick question: Mike (our Founder) is launching a brand new podcast called Parenting Adventures on June 13, 2014. Would you be willing to help us get the word out? It could be something as simple as a tweet or a Facebook post, really anything you think that could be helpful. Just let me know and I’ll send you more details when we approach the launch.

P.S. The podcast cover art is attached.

P.P.S Did you know more than 400,00 people have visited My Kids’ Adventures since we launched? Pretty cool, huh?

Every person was in a spreadsheet we used to note whether the message was sent, whether people replied to the message and if they said they’d be willing to help.

We repeated this with a slightly different script for every different group of people we defined.

We sent these emails to about 400 people and within a week had the list down to 200 people who indicated they were willing to help.

Listen to the show to find out how and when we continued to communicate with people who agreed to help.

Solicit your list to help you promote

Eleven days before the launch, we sent out this email to the My Kids’ Adventures newsletter subscribers (5,000 people).

SUBJECT: Jim, new podcast launch, your help

Hi, Jim.

I have some exciting news. We’re launching our new Parenting Adventures podcast very soon and could use your help. If you visit the link below, and agree to share the news your tweet or Facebook update will be queued and combined with many other people. Then on June 13, all those social shares will release helping the podcast launch with a bang. It takes literally seconds, see?

I linked the email to the ThunderClap campaign instead of the promotion page. I ended up with 227 people who agreed to participate in the ThunderClap campaign, with a combined social reach of 1.9 million people.

On June 19, we sent out a different email to the Social Media Examiner newsletter subscribers (260,000 people).

Listen to the show to find out why we approached these two groups differently.

Use social media

To get the buzz going and help with the launch itself, we were able to use several social properties to introduce people to the Parenting Adventures podcast.

In addition to Twitter and Facebook, we published related updates from LinkedIn and Google+. I continue to play a Parenting Adventures outro at the close of every single Social Media Marketing podcast.

Listen to the show to get insights from the ThunderClap campaign.

The results

The Parenting Adventures podcast made it to #4 in the iTunes Kids & Family category. The show is currently listed at #5 or #6 the New and Notable category and has a weekly listener base of 700 people listening to every episode.

Listen to the show to hear a key take-away and find out how we use context to gauge the success with Parenting Adventures.

Other Show Mentions

This is our largest online event. It’s completely online, so no travel involved. There will be three sessions each day spread over an entire month. Each day has a theme.

Visual marketing is an important part social media and here’s a sample of what we’re going to cover:

How to Use Visual Content to Drive Massive Social Media Engagement with Kim Garst

How to Get Noticed on Pinterest with Cynthia Sanchez

How to Build A Pinterest Presence Like Whole Foods Market with Michael Bepko from Whole Foods Market

How to Use Visual Content to Get More Shares and Drive More Traffic to Your Blog with Donna Moritz

How to Implement a Successful Instagram Marketing Plan with Jen Herman

How to Use Instagram to Sell with Sue B. Zimmerman

How to Visually Stand Out in an Image Saturated World with Jessica Gioglio from Dunkin’ Donuts

In all, we have 40 different sessions that focus on showing you how to use visual marketing across various visual channels.

If you want to learn more, visit here where you can check out all of the speakers and the agenda. Make sure you grab your ticket before the price goes up. We’ve got a lot of earlybird sales going on right now.

Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:

Ways to subscribe to the Social Media Marketing podcast:

What do you think? Are you launching or celebrating anything soon? What are your thoughts on how to best launch a product service? Please leave your comments below.